Bring your own key (BYOK)

What changes, and what does not

The hosted model is still hosted. The prompt still leaves the device. Rate limits, retention policies and outages are still the model provider’s. What changes is whose bill is hit and which model family you get. On NorthernGo the default cloud path is Gemini and counts against a monthly credit. With BYOK — Premium or Pro — the same generate pipeline posts your key to Anthropic or OpenAI instead, and that request does not reserve a NorthernGo credit.

That is a different trade from local AI. Local generation runs on your GPU or on Ollama and does not need a third-party key. BYOK is for people who already buy Claude or GPT and want those models inside the builder, not for people who need the prompt to stay on the laptop.

Where the key actually lives

A serious implementation keeps the secret off the product database. The usual pattern is browser storage plus a per-request header through a generate proxy, with the key stripped from logs. The honest sentence is therefore not “the key never touches our servers” but “the key is not retained; it transits one generate call.” Anyone who can read localStorage on that origin, or sit at that browser profile, can still copy it. Treat it like a password you pasted into a form.

What to watch out for

BYOK is not remote control of the account. Pasting a key does not let Claude open your projects or publish. It only changes which model writes the HTML when you press Generate.

A local engine still wins if it is on. WebGPU and Ollama are checked first. If they are enabled, the key is unused and you will not see a Claude bill for that click.

Failure should not silently fall back to the vendor’s meter. If your key is rejected, the product should show that error rather than spend a bundled credit on a different model. NorthernGo follows that rule on the BYOK path.